[wenc]

This is me too. Learning by doing means making mistakes in real life rather than things remaining in the realm of intellectual exercise where everything is neat and tidy.

Some people have a linear happy path to learning — they seem to be able to acquire all the right knowledge and avoid mistakes.

But I learn from doing the wrong things — the resulting cognitive dissonance burns the lesson into my head. This is an expensive way to learn because you have to make a lot of mistakes and bear the resulting shame. But over time I learned to avoid fatal mistakes and make the merely stupid ones.

I’ve always been inspired by a quote by Goro Shimura about his colleague Yutaka Taniyama (both of the Taniyama Shimura Conjecture fame, which led to the proof of Fermat’s last theorem):

“He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I've realized that it's very difficult to make good mistakes.”